2. System efficiency and Clinical Quality

Collaboration between providers and healthcare stakeholders (hospitals, insurance companies, pharmacy companies, etc.) is critical for success.

Rather than pay hospitals, physicians and pharmaceutical companies for their individual treatments, CMS instead pays for the bundle of services encompassing the entire episode of a patient’s care to all the involved stakeholders. Collectively, these stakeholders then decide how to best successfully and efficiently provide the services and allocate the payments among themselves. All participants must share data and coordinate cost-effective care in order for all to succeed. Working effectively in teams is important. Once the data is shared and analyzed, best practices can be determined allowing for the improvement of Clinical Quality based on evidence-based medicine.4

3. Patient safety

From 1999 to 2008 there has been a greater than eight-fold increase in the healthcare costs to treat preventable medical injuries and deaths from $2 billion to $17 billion dollars.5,6  The Joint Commission of Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations attributes team communication failures to be the 60% of sentinel events and the primary cause of errors leading to patient’s death.7 Healthcare reform has transferred the high costs of medical errors from society directly to physicians and medical institutions.